Thursday, December 18, 2014

It’s often said by respected and not-so respected writers
that Generation-Y is the worst generation to come into maturity. Our
never-ending need to document our lives on social platforms like Facebook, our apathy
for anything that is not within our purview, and apparently the worst sin of
all, the fact that we are devoid of originality and must mine the past for our
much maligned hipster sub-culture. Add to that people from our parent’s
generation describing Millenials in the workplace as “demanding too much and
not pulling their own weight” all contribute to Generation-Y being labeled by
many in the press as the Me-generation. Our only contribution to culture, if
one were to pay attention to the critics, is a brand of irony leaden work that
is painfully self aware, chock full of navel gazing protagonists, and endlessly
referencing something far older and more obscure than the derivative final
product that corporations market to us.

In the case of Rian Johnson’s film output one could
superficially say that the man is merely copying and pasting familiar genre
tropes onto carefully art-directed backgrounds. His debut Brick (2005) explored the harshness of high school life through the
prism of film noir while his sophomore feature The Brothers Bloom (2008) utilized the much loved conman/hustler
archetype to tell an idiosyncratic love story and sibling bromance. And his
most current feature to date Looper
(2012) melds elements of sci-fi dystopian literature with the cliché “protect
the homestead” trope found in a lot of Crime dramas and Westerns.